


lawboy83

by AndThatWasEnough



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Characters Reading Harry Potter Books, Diary/Journal, F/M, Fandom, Fandom history, Gen, Harry Potter - Freeform, LiveJournal, Multimedia, Sam Winchester's Journal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29123397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndThatWasEnough/pseuds/AndThatWasEnough
Summary: On October 19th, 2001, as he waited for his creative writing 101 class to start, Sam Winchester made his first Livejournal post.
Relationships: Amelia Richardson/Sam Winchester, Castiel & Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & John Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	lawboy83

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so! This is something...completely different than anything I have ever done before. Basically, this is what happened: near the beginning of this ongoing pandemic, I discovered "The Ms. Scribe Story" and got COMPLETELY sucked in to not just that story, but the history of the Harry Potter fandom, the Ms. Scribe Story cast of characters, the Fandom Wank community, and fandom history in general. I have learned...so much. Too much. I have, in the immortal words of Dean Winchester (RIP to a king, keep thotting it up in Heaven), become "a walking encyclopedia of weird." Compound this with the fact that I was learning all of this while the final season of SPN was in limbo, Sam coming of age in the nineties and early 2000s, and the fact that my man is OBVIOUSLY an internet-savvy HP fan, and this was born.
> 
> So...what is this?
> 
> This story is going to link you to Sam Winchester's Livejournal. It's an in-progress creative writing experiment in which I wrote journal entries from his POV starting back in 2001 to the present day and letting Sam not only tell HIS story, but the crazy fandom stories that I have come to know and love through his eyes. Because we all know he was there. What, you thought he was only doing research on that laptop? Yeah right.
> 
> And who knows? Maybe his journal will get updated every now and then, and maybe if you comment, Sam might even say something back....
> 
> Anyways. Read below and follow the link.
> 
> Happy reading :)

Sam didn’t get his first laptop computer until he was sixteen. It was one of the most glorious days of his short life thus far. His father and brother saw it as a way to shove some of the research off on him, which Sam was honestly fine with – he liked researching, actually, thanks very much, and if his father and brother thought that research was boring that was their own damn problem. He loved his ugly little Apple computer with all he had, and Dean’s only request was that he not wank off while he was in the room. _Ha_. Dean himself was fine getting his porn from a magazine (which would change in later years, but not back in the nineties), Dad could barely work a toaster, and Sam had no plans to wank with anybody in even his general _vicinity_.

So what did that leave him to do, when there was nothing to research and he couldn’t wank off?

Well – wank, of course.

xXx

“Aren’t you gettin’ a little old for those?”

Sam rolled his eyes behind the pages of _Prisoner of Azkaban_. Ever since his birthday, it seemed to Sam that John and Dean thought he would suddenly leave all of his interests behind and turn to hunting as his top priority. Not so. Sam wasn’t just going to stop reading an ongoing saga because he turned sixteen. 

“Screw off,” he mumbled, going back to his book.

Dean flopped down onto the opposite bed. “Hey, I’m not tryin’ to be a jerk. I just thought they were kids books. Isn’t Harry Potter a kid?”

Sam had to resist the urge to once again roll his eyes at his seriously out-of-touch older brother and mention the fact that at sixteen, he was sort of a kid, and sort of an adult, so he could read Harry Potter if he damned well wanted to, no matter how old he was. “ _Yes_ ,” he said testily, “but it doesn’t matter that he’s a kid. Adults can like books with kids as the main characters, dumbass. There’s a whole Yahoo! Group full of them.”

“What?” Dean asked, scrunching up his nose. “I don’t know what the hell a Yahoo is.”

“It’s an online forum.”

“And how would you know about that?”

“I’m in it.”

Dean barked a short laugh as he pulled off his boots. “You’re in an online group full of adults geeking out over a kids book? That’s fuckin’ rich, Sammy. That’s fresh.”

Sam felt his face heat up and he hid back behind his book. It was probably best, then, to not tell Dean that besides HP4GU, he was also active on MuggleNet, The Realm, UHPFC, alt.fan.harry-potter, and some other mailing lists. And he _definitely_ wasn’t going to tell him that in a moment of weakness and utter boredom had even read Gypsy Raven’s _Harry Potter and the Man of Unknown_. What? When there was nothing else to do, Sam didn’t see anything wrong with posting on some Harry Potter forums. It wasn’t like he was _writing_ fanfiction. No. Just…well, Gypsy’s story had been the first in the category and he was curious. That’s all.

There just wasn’t a whole lot to do when they were stuck at Pastor Jim’s, or Uncle Bobby’s. Well, they didn’t go to Uncle Bobby’s anymore, not since The Incident™ between him and John, but that had only been recently. Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby had never bugged him over what Sam read, and neither did his dad, really. Just Dean. But maybe that was just some sort of older brother thing. Dean was smart, but he didn’t really like reading the way Sam did, didn’t like school the way Sam did, and that was fine. That was all fine. Sam just didn’t want to be teased about what he liked because he didn’t tease Dean about what _he_ liked, on pain of getting his face shoved into his big brother’s armpit. 

Blowing into his hands, Dean put his feet up on the twin bed that he had claimed as his over the years and laid back, sighing. While Sam had been inside reading his books, Dean had been out with their dad chopping wood because the heat had gone out. The room Sam and Dean shared upstairs was tiny, and it hadn’t changed since they had first started coming here as little kids. There were two brass beds with old mattresses and quilts, but Jim regularly rotated in new pillows and sheets. There were two chests at the foot of the beds, a rug, and a bedside table with a lamp between them. The ceiling was slanted under the roof, and there were a couple small windows that were frosted over. Minnesota winters were really something else, but the late winter sun coming through them was something else, too, golden and pink and casting the tiny bedroom in a soft glow. It was a bit cold, but they had nagged some extra comforters and blankets from the linen closet – they would be fine. They always were.

Dean closed his eyes, not sleeping, just resting. He could feel the blisters forming on his hands and the numbness leaving his fingers and toes. Part of him didn’t get why Dad would take a look at Sam with his nose in a book and leave him be, not drag him out to do grueling manual labor in half a foot of snow even though ninety percent of the time he and Sam were at each other’s throats; maybe that was why, though – Dad just didn’t want the fight. Another part of Dean was sort of glad for it, that Sam could just read his geeky wizard books and scroll through his geeky wizard online fan groups or whatever the hell they were.

“Shirley’s making her fried chicken for supper,” Dean said. Shirley helped keep Jim’s rectory. She had been around the entire time the Winchesters had known Jim Murphy. Sam and Dean adored her, partly because her kitchen was open just about twenty-four-seven, even after she went home – the fridge was always packed with midnight snack food and leftovers. Nothing against greasy spoons and well-kept diners, but Shirley’s food was the best in the Midwest. “Does Harry eat fried chicken?”

“I don’t know,” Sam muttered distractedly, trying to focus on the page. 

“Maybe you should ask the question to your Yahoo friends.”

Dean just snickered when he felt the pillow land on his head. Sam didn’t want to admit it, but if he did post the question to one of the forums, it would probably get quite a bit of engagement, with people speculating just what they ate in the Great Hall that first night, or for Halloween or the students who stayed over Christmas. People could probably draw up whole menus.

Sam tucked the idea into his back pocket.

“You’re such an ass,” Sam shook his head.

“Aren’t I?” Dean grinned. “So are you the only kid in this group?”

“Huh?”

“Well.” Dean pulled himself up to lean against a couple of pillows. His back was starting to ache, too. He absently thought to himself that twenty was probably too young for backaches, but here he was. “You said it was a group for adults. You’re sixteen. That’s _technically_ not an adult.”

Sam snorted. “I thought you said I wasn’t a kid, either.”

“You’re a teenager. Right? You’re neither. So what’d you do, lie?”

Sam finally gave up on finishing the chapter, dog-earring the page and setting his book on the bedside table. “I guess,” he shrugged. “It’s just…well, there’s a lot of new sites and mailing lists, and I wanted to be on all of them.”

Dean considered this. “So that’s what you do on that computer of yours – talk about Harry Potter and lie.”

“Boys!” Shirley called. “Dinnertime! Go wash your hands!”

Both boys jumped up from their beds and rushed for the bathroom, Dean blocking Sam out to his younger brother’s complaints. Sam scowled at Dean through the mirror. “What is it, bitch boy? Ya snooze, ya lose.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam groused, shouldering his way into the tiny washroom and standing off to the side. “I only lied once.”

“What?”

“I only lied the once about how old I was. And I said I was eighteen, not forty.”

“Oh, but the tiny lies – they snowball,” Dean smirked. He flicked wet hands at him. “Get your little ass in gear before I eat all the mashed potatoes.”

“Don’t take the thigh!” Sam called after him. They were his favorite. Dean made a noncommittal noise as he lumbered down the old staircase, but Sam knew he would save it. He always did if he asked.

As Sam dried his hands, he thought about lies – the little ones, the ones that snowball. But saying he was two years older than he actually was wasn’t really anything. It really wasn’t, especially considering he didn’t spend anywhere near as much time on HP4GU as he did on The Realm or MuggleNet. They were all so new, so Sam wanted to be on all of them, even if he already had some he spent more time on than others. And, considering they never stayed put in one place long enough to make any long-term friendships, it was nice to know there were people out there he could talk to about books they loved. That was all.

Sam hung up the towel and turned out the light, off to eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes, and probably some green beans. And then, as Dean slept, he would catch up on PoA discussion and read under the covers with his flashlight, just as he had always done. Dad didn’t even check on him to tell him to go to sleep anymore.

xXx

Little lies certainly do snowball into big ones, and Sam and Dean would have to worry about it later in their lives, but Sam’s little white lie was nothing this time around.

There would be bigger lies, but Sam would only be lucky enough to bear witness to them.

Well – some of them.

The other lies were ones he was directly complicit in. But at least he didn’t get wanked-on for it on the internet.

xXx

This story starts on October 19th, 2001, in a Stanford classroom waiting for his evening class to begin. Sam Winchester sits and waits for his creative writing class to start – yes, he’s read fic by this point, but he’s more interested in writing original work. The young woman next to him, Jenna Ashby, asks if he’s heard of Livejournal. She likes to go on there to find fellow Harry/Hermione shippers.

Sam hasn’t.

But at 8:49 pm, [he publishes his first post](https://lawboy8-3.livejournal.com/).

**Author's Note:**

> Stay safe, stay healthy, wear a mask, and thanks for reading!


End file.
